Google Analytics Pages Per Visitor and Average Length of Visit Reports

The Pages Per Visitor and Average Length of Visit reportsare important reports in Google Analytics. These reports give you insights into your mom blog readers and important information you need when you’re preparing your blog to work with advertisers and brands.

To view your Google Analytics reports, log in to your account and simply click the View Report link next to your blog name on your Google Analytics home page. This will bring you to your Dashboard, which gives you the highlights of the most important information in your analytics account.

Your Pages Per Visitor report is the average number of pages a visitor views with no more than 30 minutes between page requests. Your Average Length of Visit report is the average actual length of time a visitor spends on your site.

If you have a high pages-per-visitor count (over 3 to 4), or average length of visit (over 2–3 minutes), it means that readers come to your blog and want to stick around.

To view the Pages Per Visitor and Average Length of Visit report, go to your Dashboard and click Visitors on the left menu. Then, in the main page area, click Average Pageviews to see your pages per visitor; click Time on Site to see your average length of visit.

Visitors Overview in Google Analytics.

Here’s how these reports give both you and your potential advertisers an understanding of how engaged your readers are.

Why brands care about your Pages Per Visitor and Average Length of Visit reports: If those figures are high, they suggest that you have an engaged audience that interacts with the content you create, and you probably influence their purchasing decisions.

A high number is very relative — on a community forum, a well-engaged visitor will view ten or more pages and stay for more than five minutes. On a news site, an average visitor may view only two pages and stay for a little over a minute.

A blog that gets a lot of comments certainly shows you have an engaged audience. But for the kinds of blogs that aren’t big drivers of conversations (for example, a coupon blog), these numbers show your reader engagement in another way.

Why you should care about Pages Per Visitor and Average Length of Visit reports: Growing these numbers is evidence that your readers are increasingly satisfied with your content and makes it more likely they’ll recommend your site to others. Your readers are probably finding what they’re looking for on your site instead of elsewhere on the Web, which means they’ll likely return in the future.

Plus: If you’re selling advertising, more page views can mean more revenue in your pocket. The more advertising views you can generate, the more you have to sell.

If you can increase the number of pages viewed per visitor, you can sometimes increase your advertising revenue, even without more people visiting your site. This is possible when you are getting paid for every ad view you display. You can increase your pages per visitor by writing longer posts and breaking them up, or by recommending related content to your readers at the end of every post.